NYFF 64: "My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile" is as vivid as its predecessor

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

Forget spectacle, forget box office, forget IP and star power. Digger? I hardly know her! The biggest, most epic movie of the year is Julia Loktev’s six-hour documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile, a continuation of last year’s Part I, subtitled Last Air in Moscow. That film followed roughly a dozen journalists, most of them women, at the independent reporting outfit known as TV Rain. These folks had already spent years operating as “undesirables” or “foreign agents” (ie, folks not mindlessly repeating government propaganda), and worked to undermine the dictums coming from the Kremlin despite constant surveillance and the imprisonment of several colleagues. Last Air in Moscow concluded with a huge chunk of TV Rain’s reporters fleeing Russia following the start of their invasion into Ukraine in February 2022.

The military operation led Putin’s government to immediately crack down on independent media, meaning these journalists had to get the fuck out of dodge or risk being jailed. Last Air in Moscow filmed across a span of several months in 2021-2022, and Exile takes up right where that film left off, seeing those same faces (and a few new ones) all the way to March 2026...

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April Showers: The Loneliest Planet

April Showers Returns! (Most nights @ 11)

When I reviewed The Loneliest Planet last year, I puposely avoided the one true spoiler that the whole movie pivots on -- "the incident" as the director calls it. But my aversion to spoilers was so pronounced that I got a little carried away. I didn't even reveal what the first scene of the film entailed. But by now, since this returning series is all about film showers, you've surely guessed it.

I began my review this way:

The first of the senses that writer/director Julia Loktev hits us with over the opening black screen is hearing. The sound is a rhythmic pounding / creaking / breathing that's hard to place (sex scene? construction work?). When the fade-up happens, you'd never guess what image is waiting for you! It's something both utterly mundane and alien and strange. This is only the first of the surprises that await you as you journey across the Georgian wilderness with Nica (Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) in The Loneliest Planet. 

That utterly mundane yet alien [NSFW] image is after the jump...

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